Hi there!
Get ready to have your inspirational mind blown. The chair in the above picture is painted. That's right - we painted the chair base and then we went right ahead and painted the fabric too!! And it looks awesome!
We have had lots of questions about this here in the studio so I thought I would do a proper tutorial post on this. Here is where we started:
This chair arrived, ugly, dirty and overall pretty gross . . . but she had some nice lines - and a swivel base!
This chair arrived at the studio in pretty rough condition! I put a few calls out to see if we could get it reupholstered but the cost was just too high. . . what to do, what to do . . . this is when we decided we had nothing to lose by giving it some paint.
A quick collaboration with my intern Lindsay and we decided on van Gogh's 'River Tides' for the fabric and van Gogh's 'Honeymoon' from the liquid metals line for the base.
After cleaning the chair (read: shopvac the heck out of it), we stirred up our paint and poured it into a separate container. Then in order to make the paint a bit easier to work with we diluted it with water by approx. 25%. We used our medium sized round wax/paint brush for this job for quicker coverage and it worked great!
As you can see from this picture, things definitely got a bit worse before they got better. . . but such is the way when restyling furniture. Sometimes you have to stick with your vision and push through the 'ugly' stage.
This picture shows how our chair was looking after one full coat. Still a bit yucky! At this step we also had a coat of 'chivalry' under painted on the chair base.
Once our paint was dry we applied a second coat in the same manner. Then to remove some of the 'rough bits' we took a sanding block and went gently over the whole chair. Not distressing - just 'softening'. After this we applied a third coat of 'River Tides' overall and a coat of 'Honeymoon' to the chair base. She was starting to look pretty good so we kept going . . .
The next day we lightly sanded again and then applied a protective wax finish overall. This made the paint a bit softer and adds a bit of protection to the paint. All finished - now for her final photo shoot!
Painted upholstered swivel chair available at Mango Reclaimed, $275.
I couldn't resist, lol!
To see this chair and other great restyled pieces we have available visit the 'our work' section of our website here.
What do you think about this? Amazing right?!? Do you have any upholstered pieces that need a restyle? Swing by our studio to find out how!